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Good Mood:
The New Psychology
of Overcoming Depression

Chapter 13

cont.

There are several reasons why "count your blessings" therapy alone is often insufficient to pull a person out of deep depression. 1) Much mental energy is required to focus on your blessings. Just as it is hard work to keep one's eye fixed firmly on the ball in tennis or golf, depressed persons often lack the necessary energy. 2) Pain from a particular source-- physical or mental--may be sufficiently intense to prevent concentration on something else. (Remember your lack of complete success in distracting yourself when the dentist is drilling?) Furthermore, you must believe that your blessings are important relative to other aspects of your life in order to focus on them, and many depressives have mechanisms that systematically act to devalue their objective blessings.

James put it this way:

The method of averting one's attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work. It will work with many persons; it will work far more generally than most of us are ready to suppose, and within the sphere of its successful operation there is nothing to be said against it as a religious solution. But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes; and even though one be quite free from melancholy one's self, there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.7

Perhaps the most important reason, however, why "count your blessings" doesn't do the whole job with some people is that a person must "want" to achieve the good feelings that come with counting one's blessings. If you believe that you ought to count your blessings, or to achieve good feeling, then you might be disposed to do so. But if you have had little experience in your lifetime with simple good feeling, this goal will not seem a reasonable or achievable one. More about this in Chapter 18 Values Treatment.

Sweetening The Denominator By Learning Your History

Learning how and why you acquired certain benchmark standards of comparison can often make it easier for you to change your denominator. This is often a matter of realizing that you did not choose the standard yourself on the basis of reasonable experience and thought, but rather the standard was thrust upon you. Then you can be responsive to Ellis's command (!) that you not let yourself be commanded to accept any goal or standard that others have set for you, or that you have set for yourself; this is the heart of his method for overcoming depression.

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Take, for example, my mother always telling me (surely with the best of intentions) that I could do better than I had done. This caused me to feel that I had accomplished less than I ought to have accomplished (and less than I had accomplished). After I came to understand that as an adult I criticize myself in the same way that my mother criticized me as a child, I could then take the next step--understanding that I am not obligated to accept my mother's point of view about this; I am not required to always judge that I could do better, to always get closer to perfection. And with that discovery I learned to say to myself "Don't criticize" every time I hear myself saying, in imitation of my mother, "You can do better," or "That's not up to the standard you should reach." And with that discovery I took the first step on the road to conquering depression (though in itself this did not, and could not, cure me of depression, for my own idiosyncratic reasons; more about that later.)

The Freudian method known as psychoanalysis is essentially a technique for self-discovery, and especially for learning about one's childhood, which is assumed by Freudians to be necessary for a cure. Delving into memories of one's early years takes place in several hour-long weekly over the course of several years, usually. Discovery of the causes of your contemporary behavior and feelings--for example, the causes of your contemporary negative self-comparisons and depression--might be enough to cure your depression, because the necessary change in your behavior and outlook may be obvious. But more likely, the discovery is not enough, though it can be used as valuable input to careful thinking about your present and future.

In contrast cognitive-behavioral therapy does not find that examining one's childhood memories is usually crucial in overcoming depression.

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